This CD-rom presents facsimiles from five early Dutch bookson the exploration of Australia. Each of the texts represents a different way of editing and publishing travel stories. In the Dutch Republic of the 17th century there was a great interest in the travelogues of the ships that had made the long voyage to the East Indies and even further. Merchants were constantly looking for profitable investments. Scholars were fascinated by the descriptions of strange animals and peoples. Cartographers were eagerly waiting for more details on far away shores and islands. And the general public was fond of the sensational stories about shipwrecks, mutinies and the like. As literacy was wide-spread, there was a large audience and many itineraries, land descriptions, atlases and the like were printed and reprinted over and over.

The descriptions of the five books presented here were taken from the Short-Title Catalogue, Netherlands.

Ongeluckige voyagie, van't schip Batavia nae de Oost-Indien [...]. Vytgevaren onder den E. Francoys Pelsert. Amsterdam: J. Jansz., 1647.A typical example of a cheap publication for a wide audience. The catastrophe on the Houtman Abrolhos, where the voyage of the proud Batavia ended in shipwreck, mutiny and slaughter, has been reprinted many times. This is the rare first edition, published by the renowned bookseller Johannes Janssonius. Six pages of engraved illustrations add to the dramatic story.Learn more

On October 28 1628 the VOC East Indiamen ship Batavia sailed from Texel, in the North of the Netherlands, on her maiden journey to Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia). Seven other ships of various sizes accompanied her.

In the early hours of 4 June 1629 the Dutch East India Company ship Batavia, with 316 people on board, was wrecked on Morning Reef in the Wallabi Group of the Abrolhos Islands just 60 km off the coast of Geraldton, Western Australia.

What followed was the most horrific mutiny in the annals of maritime history with the systematic torture, rape and murder of 125 shipwreck survivors at the hand of a religious fanatic - one of the ship's senior officers - and his followers.http://www.voc.iinet.net.au/batavia.html

The reconstructed section of the VOC (United Dutch East India Company) ship Batavia is on display in the Batavia Gallery at the Shipwreck Galleries, Western Australian Maritime Museum, Fremantle.

28 October, 2007

A self-taught artist, Joseph Cornell relied almost exclusively on found materials. He collected items from books, newspapers, second-hand stores, exploratory walks — even sweepings from his studio floor — to create intricate, elaborate box constructions and collages. These enchanting works of art transformed commonplace objects into extraordinary and magical dreamscapes, earning him immediate and enduring respect as a sort of artistic alchemist.

Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination brings together nearly 200 works dating from the 1930s until the artist's death in 1972, offering the first comprehensive retrospective of his work in a quarter century at its only West Coast venue.http://www.sfmoma.org/exhibitions/exhib_detail.asp?id=264

Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination, developed by the Peabody Essex Museum, is available from any computer with Internet access. This dynamic program presents an overview of the themes highlighted in the current exhibition, a close look at key works of art, and excerpts from Cornell's private journals.

What is a virtual museum? A virtual museum can be defined as an interactive virtual space that provides information and exhibits cultural objects in digital format. Virtual museums vary in their degree of virtuality, depending on the type of cultural objects they exhibit. While many virtual museums show digital copies of real works of art (that is, reproductions of artworks that exist in the physical world), some virtual museums display artworks that are created in cyberspace and have no physical embodiment (e.g., net art, digital photography).

Due to its low cost and simple organization, the virtual museum has been in many cases a means of creating museums that cannot exist in the physical world. While some virtual museums constitute reproductions of existing museums (e.g., the web sites of

These virtual museums have made possible the collection of artworks that belong to numerous galleries and museums around the world. For instance, there are virtual museums that exhibit national collections that would be impossible to display in a real museum or gallery due to legal and economic factors. (For example, the Museo Imaginado of Spain displays digital copies of Spanish paintings that belong to collections outside of Spain.)

The papers in this issue cover a range of different topics but coalesce around the role of vision and other senses in the creation of meaning. As usual, there isa good combination of practical and theoretical papers. We hope you will find it enjoyable reading.

During the Edo Period (1615-1868), a uniquely Japanese art from developed known as ukiyo-e, or "pictures of the floating world." For the first time in Japanese history, a rising class of city dwellers had the financial means to support an art of their own - an art which reflected their interests and tastes.

An opening night performance, “Australian Graffiti,” by Christian Bumbarra Thompson, fresh from recent successes in Berlin and Cologne, will be held at SPACE, 6:30 p.m.

There will be an artist talk by John Gillies at Wood Street Galleries on Saturday, October 20, at 1 p.m. The exhibit closes on December 31, 2007. All events are free and open to the public.

“WORKIN' DOWN UNDER features the work of five contemporary Australian artists who, through diverse media and approaches, explore issues of identity across cultures and time, including its own demise,” writes Wood Street Galleries curator Murray Horne.

Hailing from a country of colonists and colonized, John Gillies and Christian Bumbarra Thompson reflect complicated relationships with the nation’s past. Gillies’ sheep in Divide are an apt metaphor for the quandaries of occupation, territory and genealogy. In looping a video clip of a traditional greeting between the artist and his father, Thompson suggests the eternal endurance of aboriginal culture--one that has already persisted at least 40,000 years.

Tracey Moffatt and John Tonkin imagine alternate identities past, present and future. In Under the Sign of Scorpio, Moffatt assumes and represents the identities of 40 women born under the same astrological star, from Marie Currie to Hillary Clinton. Tonkin’s interactive Personal Eugenics allows participants to morph their own self-image toward their descriptions of who they would like to become.

Responding to identities increasingly exposed, Denis Beaubois offers an installment of the ongoing Terminal Vision Project. In a gesture of visual suicide, he uses the latest camera surveillance technology to capture the destruction of the very devices that make our private lives so public.